Among their ranks was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, who collaborated with poet and novelist Maxine Cumin, a Pulitzer recipient herself, on a series of four children’s books in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, a decade after their first collaboration, the duo wrote Joey and the Birthday Present (public library), featuring charming vintage illustrations by Caldecott-winning artist Evaline Ness. It tells the story of Joey the brown field mouse, who lives with his large family in nests all over an abandoned farmhouse. After people move in for the summer, Joey is surprised to find a little white mouse named Prince in a cage in their son’s bedroom. The two become unlikely friends, learning about each other’s worlds.

There is wonderfully subtle humor, too. When Joey creeps into the boy’s bedroom, he is baffled to see Prince scurrying on the hamster wheel, “as though he were running away from an invisible cat.” Their first exchange is imbued with equal parts absurdism and indignation, perhaps the two most common mechanisms by which we keep ourselves on our own hamster wheel of approval and achievement:

“You poor thing,” Joey said. “Are you in trouble? What are you running away from?”

“In the first place, I’m not a thing,” said the white mouse.

It is a sweet story of friendship, compassion, and perspective, but is also remarkably bittersweet in the context of Sexton’s reality: the book was published shortly before she took her own life a month before her 46th birthday.

But it is Ness’s enchanting four-color illustrations that make the book immeasurably wonderful its message one of optimism and hope, perhaps the kind Sexton tried so tirelessly to summon, by the very act of writing children’s books, despite her tragic pathology.

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“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.”

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is among the most imaginative, important, and influential children’s book creators of all time, an artist and writer of unparalleled creative vision and great sensitivity to life’s ineffable nuances. A recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award, she had the courage to turn down Walt Disney and build her own creative empire. From her beloved Moomins characters to her spectacular vintage illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit, her stories exude the metaphorical magic of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh tales, the fanciful whimsy of Baum’s Oz world, the contemplative introspection of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, and the enchanting symbolism of Carroll’s Wonderland. Philip Pullman has aptly called her “a genius of a very subtle kind” and Neil Gaiman considers her work “a surrealist masterpiece.”

Tove Jansson in 1967 (photograph by Hans Gedda)

Jansson’s singular sensibility springs from her own unusual life. Born to an artistic and rather eccentric family from Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority, young Tove was raised by wildly creative parents — her father was one of Finland’s greatest sculptors and her mother designed books and postage stamps, illustrated book jackets, and created punchy political cartoons. Jansson completed her formal training in art and graphic design in various institutions across Sweden, Finland, and France, but the origin of her iconic Moomin characters was rooted in an affectionate family joke rather than in her formal training — while studying in Stockholm in her late teens and living with relatives there, Jansson would regularly sneak into the kitchen for treats; her uncle would tease her that a “Moomintroll” lived in the kitchen pantry, ready to breathe cold air down stealthy snackers’ necks.

Moominvalley’s main protagonist, Moomintroll, is thus a self-portrait of sorts, but perhaps Jansson’s most interesting character is also the one based on the most intimate part of her life. Too-ticky, the sage of Moominvalley who solves even the most existential of problems with equal parts practicality and wisdom, was inspired by the love of Jansson’s life — the great Finnish sculptor and graphic arts pioneer Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, Jansson’s spouse. The two women met in art school during their twenties and remained together until Jansson’s death more than six decades later, collaborating on a lifetime of creative projects — all at a time when queer couples were straddling the impossible line between anguishing invisibility and dangerous visibility.

Jansson and Pietilä crafting characters for the television adaptation of the Moomin series.

Although Too-ticky, clad in her signature red-and-white sweater, appears in a number of the Moomin books, her spirit blossoms most vibrantly in the 1957 gem Moominland Midwinter (public library), where “her common sense often restores order in the valley.” More than mere common sense, however, Too-ticky’s laconic sagacity and aphoristic reflections are full of invaluable wisdom on life.

The book tells the story of Moomintroll who, unlike his family that hibernated from November to April every year, wakes up early and decides to stay up through the harsh Scandinavian winter. He grows angry at the sun’s absence, angry at the raging blizzards, angry at those who seem able to enjoy rather than resent the season of snow and ice. It is a tale of learning to live with the vital discomfort of uncertainty, to get lost in order to find oneself, to surrender to the rhythms of life rather than agonizing in resistance.

Lost in the forest, Moomintroll comes upon a warm light emanating from a cozy hole someone had dug for shelter — “someone who lay looking up at the serene winter sky and whistling very softly to herself.” It is, of course, Too-ticky. When Moomintroll inquires about the song she is whistling, she replies, Whitman-like, with a wonderfully metaphorical answer:

It’s a song of myself… The refrain is about the things one can’t understand. I’m thinking about the aurora borealis. You can’t tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.

This theme of uncertainty and of finding joy in questioning reality is a recurring one for Too-ticky. Echoing the first of Bertrand Russell’s ten famous commandments of teaching, learning, and life — “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.” — she offers comforting solidarity in Moomintroll’s lament that he doesn’t understand the snow:

I don’t either… You believe it’s cold, but if you build yourself a snowhouse it’s warm. You think it’s white, but at times it looks pink, and another time it’s blue. It can be softer than anything, and then again harder than stone. Nothing is certain.

In many ways, Too-ticky’s wisdom seems almost Zen Buddhist in nature. In addition to championing the ability to be at peace with uncertainty, she also advocates a minimalist approach to material possessions — when Moomintroll discovers, distraught and indignant, that someone is secretly smuggling things out of his sleeping family’s house, Too-ticky responds:

That’s nice, isn’t it? You’ve got too many things about you. As well as things you remember, and things you’re dreaming about.

When the sun does appear, it flits across the horizon for a fleeting moment, only to set back down. Moomintroll is even more frustrated, but Too-ticky assures him that the sun, like the myth of the overnight success, follows an incremental rise to brilliance:

He’ll return tomorrow… And then he’ll be a tiny bit bigger, about like a piece of cheese rind. Take it easy.

The story is also a gentle primer on evolution. When Moomintroll, against Too-ticky’s instruction, opens her secret cabinet and finds a strange creature living there, he tells her it was “only a sort of old rat,” but she corrects him:

That was no rat. It was a troll. A troll of the kind you were yourself before you became a Moomin. That was how you looked a thousand years ago.

Moomintroll is so unsettled by the notion that he is related to a mere rat — an elegant allegory for why some people are drawn to such defensive fancies as Young Earth creationism — he storms into the attic to look for an old family album. Janssen writes:

Page after page of dignified Moomins, most often reproduced standing in front of porcelain stoves, or on fret-worked verandahs. Not a single one of them resembled the cupboard troll. “Must be a mistake,” Moomintroll thought. “He can’t be any relation of mine.”

Slowly, Moomintroll makes peace with Too-ticky’s knowledge:

He went down and looked at his sleeping Pappa. Only the nose bore some resemblance to the troll’s. But possibly, a thousand years ago.

There is almost a cosmology element to this undercurrent — a reminder that, however discomfiting this too may be to most humans, we are indeed a cosmic accident. Janssen traces the evolution of Moomintroll’s understanding:

Suddenly he felt very proud of having an ancestor. And it cheered him no little to think that Little My [Moomintroll’s sister] had no pedigree at all, but rather had come into the world by chance.

But perhaps her most profound wisdom deals with our quintessential struggle to make peace with death, which stems from an inability to recognize the comforting interconnectedness of life. When the Lady of the Cold — the beautiful but formidable priestess of the Great Cold, capable of turning into an icicle any fool so bewitched as to look straight into her eyes — freezes the cheerful little squirrel Moomintroll had befriended, Too-ticky sighs:

It’s very hard to tell if people take any pleasure in their tails when they’re dead.

When one’s dead, then one’s dead. This squirrel will become earth all in his time. And later on still there’ll grow trees from him, with new squirrels skipping about in them. Do you think that’s so very sad?

Too-ticky’s greatest gift, it appears, is a certain quality of presence — the kind she cultivated in “her own private winter world that had followed its own strange rules year after year” — that allows her to feel one with the world. It is from that standpoint that, when spring finally arrives, she responds to Moomintroll’s accusation that she hadn’t comforted him during the long winter by offering assurance that spring will come, but instead focused on what the world had to offer right there and then. Too-ticky’s answer, emanating a kind of Emerson-like ideal of self-reliance, rings with extraordinary, if uncomfortable, poignancy:

One has to discover everything for oneself. And get over it all alone.

Moomintroll imbibes Too-ticky’s existential lesson. Soon, when his friend the Snork Maiden comes across “the first brave nose-tip of a crocus” shyly trying to push through snow, she suggests they put a glass over it to protect it from the frost at night. But Moomintroll objects:

No, don’t do that. Let it fight it out. I believe it’s going to do still better if things aren’t so easy.

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A sweet and irreverent reminder that kindness is the most potent antidote to evil.

Given my inexhaustible affection for vintage children’s books, I was instantly smitten by the 1965 gem Petunia, I Love You (public library) by Roger Duvoisin, part of his altogether delightful Petunia series — the story of the conniving Raccoon, who sets out to make Petunia the goose, “so handsome and so fat,” his dinner, but ends up making a good friend instead. Tucked into the vibrantly illustrated tale is a sweet, irreverent reminder that the unlikeliest, most rewarding of friendships are free to blossom as soon as we dissolve the shackles of our own agendas and that selfless kindness, which needs neither forgiveness nor permission, is the greatest antidote to evil, something with which both Tolstoy and Gandhi would concur.

When he first lays out on Petunia, Raccoon instantly knows that the plump goose eclipses him in strength considerably — “a blow from her wing had put to flight bigger animas than he” — so he turns to deception instead.

Enlisting his smarmy charm, he approaches Petunia, taking her for a farm fool:

“Dear Petunia,” said the Raccoon, who had thought of a wicked scheme, “you are so pretty. I love you, Petunia.
It would make me so happy just to have your company for a little walk in the forest.
Today, I am going to see my old aunt. Won’t you come along?”

“You are so polite and kind, Raccoon,” said Petunia.
“It would be rude of me to refuse. pray, lead the way.”

“To your honor, dear Petunia, I’ll walk behind you.”

But Petunia is no boob. She insists they walk side by side to “make the conversation more pleasant.” Reluctantly, Raccoon goes along with the request, deciding to trap her once they get to the forest.

And yet ruse after ruse, Petunia manages to outwit the exasperated Raccoon, who proceeds to fall into a creek, get stuck in a hole, endure an attack by bees, and barely escape getting squashed by a giant rock — all calculated “accidents” of his own invention, aimed at Petunia but incurred by Raccoon himself.

All throughout his failed assassination attempts, Petunia calmly helps Raccoon out of his own traps, unfazed by the series of disaster scenarios.

Once they return to the farm, Raccoon is so tired and hungry that he is ready to eat anything at all. Suddenly, he smells strawberry jam in a metal box behind the barn and rustles into it, only to find himself a captive of the farmer’s trap. Just as the farmer approaches, with the unequivocal mission of doom, Petunia releases the lock and Raccoon runs for dear life as his savior follows in effortless flight.

Shaken by his near-death experience and the kindness of his inadvertent friend, Raccoon confesses his original “wicked scheme,” apologizing sincerely and vowing to be Petunia’s “truest friend, for ever and ever.”

He walks her back to the farm gate and, as they part, he once again says, “Petunia, I love you” — only this time, it beams from the heart.

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“Many homosexuals live together in stable relationships. The time will come when homosexual marriages are recognized,” two Danish psychologists predicted in their honest, controversial, and now-iconic guide to teenage sexuality in 1969. But decades would pass before their prognosis would slowly, painfully begin to come true. In the meantime, those “stable relationships” were denied the dignity of being called a family and forced to conform to the mainstream-normative narratives of what a family actually is.

In the 1980s, writer Lesléa Newman began noticing that same-sex couples were having kids like everybody else, but had no children’s books to read to them portraying non-traditional family units. At that point, women had been “marrying” one another for ages, but true marriage equality in the eyes of the law and the general public was still two decades away, as were children’s books offering alternate narratives on what makes a family. So Newman enacted the idea that the best way to complain is to make things and penned Heather Has Two Mommies (public library) — a sweet, straightforward picture-book illustrated by Diana Souza, telling the story of a warm and accepting playground discussion of little Heather’s life with Mama Kate, a doctor, and Mama Jane, a carpenter.

Heather’s favorite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two hands, and two feet. She also has two pets: a ginger-colored cat named Gingersnap and a big black dog named Midnight.

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